Imported From France, a New Sitcom Set in Brooklyn

Brian Harkin for The New York Times Antonio Alfeo driving a modified taxi during the filming of a French television show, “Brooklyn Taxi.” The show’s creators say Brooklyn has  become a selling point in Europe.

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Alain Tasma, center, directing a scene on Roosevelt Island.

A 1998 action-comedy movie “Taxi” was set in a place with intriguing museums and galleries, appealing restaurants and a multicultural population â€" Marseille, on the southeastern coast of France.

A new French sitcom, the latest offshoot of that film, is set in a place with intriguing museums and galleries, appealing restaurants and a multicultural population â€" Brooklyn.

Even across the Atlantic, Brooklyn is big.

“Brooklyn is the face of New York now,” said Gaetan Rousseau, a producer of the sitcom, “Brooklyn Taxi,” about a police detective who has become a laughingstock at her Brooklyn precinct because she is a rotten driver. She depends on a cabby â€" and his souped-up taxi â€" to go where the criminals are.

Mr. Rousseau and the show’s French producers say that Brooklyn has become a selling point in Europe for a show with a $35 million budget and 12 episodes now being shot. Audiences in places where “Brooklyn Taxi” will be broadcast have heard all about Brooklyn’s renaissance over the last 10 to 15 years, including the Nets basketball team and the Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, the team’s majority owner; the rap artist Jay-Z; the Atlantic Yards development; and hipsters.

“Brooklyn is more than Manhattan,” said Mr. Rousseau, who has lived in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for eight years. “I live, like, four blocks from the Barclays Center. I see the change. It could have been ‘New York Taxi,’ but if you live in Brooklyn, you know there are no yellow cabs, so ‘Brooklyn Taxi,’ it’s funny.”

Mr. Rousseau said the producers originally wanted to shoot “Brooklyn Taxi” in Toronto because they believed it would be cheaper than New York. “I told them because the tax credit was better, shoot it in New York,” Mr. Rousseau said. “The attraction for the network and the actors was â€" it’s a better sale when you say, ‘Would you spend six months in New York?’”

“Brooklyn Taxi” is the first foreign television production to receive a state film tax credit. Under a nine-year-old program, productions that do three-quarters of their production filming in the state can receive a credit of as much as 30 percent. Mr. Rousseau said that it would be “in the $5 million range” for “Brooklyn Taxi.”

The stars are Chyler Leigh, a regular on the prime time drama “Grey’s Anatomy” from 2007 to 2012, as the detective, and Jacky Ido, who appeared in the 2009 Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds.”

They do not parler français on “Brooklyn Taxi.” All the dialogue is in English. Every line will be dubbed before the program goes on the air in France â€" and also in Russia, Japan and Italy, because the producers say “Brooklyn Taxi” has already been sold to networks in those countries.

The show’s home base, the 125th Precinct, is as fictional as the one on the new Fox sitcom “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” â€" the Police Department has no 125th Precinct, just as it has no 99th. The 125th exists on a soundstage in Queens, not in Brooklyn, and the outdoor scenes may not be where they appear to be, either.

Last week, when the script called for Ms. Leigh to demand information about a drug dealer from an inmate on Rikers Island, the cast and crew went to Roosevelt Island. Exterior shots from Rikers will be edited in later.

So Ms. Leigh rehearsed a scene that called for her to walk across a parking lot at Rikers. But the parking lot where the cameras rolled was behind the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital, which is to be demolished for the applied sciences graduate school that Cornell University is planning. Then the cameras moved to a vacant wing upstairs for a tense scene in what was supposed to be a prison-infirmary room.

And while there appears to be only one taxi in “Brooklyn Taxi,” Mr. Ido explained that the show actually has four.

One is a head-turner, even in New York: The driver’s seat and the steering wheel are on the roof, out of range of the cameras on the hood. The actor at the wheel in the passenger compartment only looks as if he or she is driving.

“New York is used to filming, used to Brad Pitt on a corner,” said Moe Bardach, a producer of “Brooklyn Taxi” who was a co-producer and unit production manager on “Law & Order.” “They’re not used to a car being driven from the roof by a helmeted, professional driver.”

Shooting a scene with the car is faster and less expensive than shooting a car scene the conventional way, on a trailer.

The driver on the roof, Antonio Alfeo, said the special car was safe at any speed, although on a shoot in Queens, the police told him not to go faster than 45 miles an hour.

But he said that speed was not the only consideration.

“It’s top-heavy,” he said. “If I take a turn too fast and don’t control the body sway, it could tip over.”